779- Hotline

Discussion (36) ¬

While turning it off and on again usually works for murderbots, the question these guys cannot usually answer is “how?”. In particular, “how do I get to the switch without being killed?” This is why all murderbots need to have a remote shutdown switch, several remote shutdown switches, none of which you tell them about.

“… Hmm… I see… Someone seems to have confused use of Safe Torque Off with a Safe Operating Stop. Murderbots will reroute and bypass the Control Power Relays then, auto-enable Motion Power, during the STO delay.

I was working for a major retail store overnights unloading trucks while I was in collage. One of the managers was on the phone with corporate IT to fix some local server problem. He gets asked to hand the phone to the most technical guy in the building. Manager hands the phone to me and the IT guy proceeds to tell me step by step how to perform a hard reboot of the computer…. I was working on my IT programming degree. Of course, the IT guy didn’t know that, so I don’t blame him, but all he really had to do was tell me to turn it off and turn it back on again. LOL

As an IT guy who spends a lot of time telling people to turn it off and then on again. If the IT guy had to resort to asking for the phone to be handed to someone else he had already tried and failed multiple times to talk the manager through a hard reboot. At that point you do not take anything for granted and minutely instruct the new person taking no basic level of competence or simple problem solving ability for granted.

I have had people turn off the computer screen thinking that turned off the power. Multiple times while arguing that there is not a power button on the computer case itself.

Depends on circumstance. As the senior “IT guy”, I’ve told people repeatedly for years that when/if a machine is penetrated from outside, either pull the power to the VM’s or yank the network cables. Given the internal nature of VM switches, pulling the power is probably the better option. And you can ask anyone who got hit by the disaster of notPetya about whether or not that’s the better option.

I used to do internet/VOIP tech support for a major cable company, and the flip side of that situation would be when I’d have a customer ask right off if they could just verify their identity and account then hand the phone off to their seven or eight year old grandkid because he/she is better with computers. And every single time that happened it was the easiest call of my night because the kids always followed instructions without question and needed minimal explanation for doing things they were unfamiliar with, like checking/changing IP settings or doing a ping test. Most adults would spend a less time actually doing what they were told than asking a bunch of paranoid questions because they didn’t know what they were doing and were afraid they would somehow make their computer explode or something.

For those who think that the military is looking for more lethal killbots, it should be mentioned that the experience with military R&D has made them far more afraid of the situation than the average person.

There was a demonstration of the Sergeant York anti-aircraft system. (This was a combination of guns and missiles.) In the middle of the demonstration, the gun swivels and aims directly at the reviewing stand. This resulted in a number of colonels and generals jumping off the top of the reviewing stand and scrambling as quickly as possible to put some distance between them and the gun. The contractor explained that the gun always tried to aim at the object that most resembled a target. Between trials, that was the reviewing stand. Despite assurances from the contractor that it wouldn’t have started shooting, that was the end of the project. (It was also revealed that the contractor had been concealing other problems.

There was also a machine gun that could be aimed and fired using a control cable. A short in the cable caused it to keep firing while slowly turning.

It’s little wonder his project was shut down. Pretty much the first rule of gun safety is “Never point the gun at something you do not intend to shoot at” and I’m pretty sure that holds even more true the bigger the gun.